Opinion: After Sheng Thao, the last thing Oakland needs is a strong mayor

Thirteen months ago, we launched the Oakland Charter Reform Project by publishing an op-ed in this newspaper, “Broken Oakland needs more than a new mayor.” In that piece, we laid out the four fundamental flaws that contribute to so much of the dysfunction in City Hall: a powerless mayor, a disconnected City Council, a conflicted city attorney and a city administrator caught between the mayor and council.

Mayor Barbara Lee subsequently made a commitment to modernize the city charter. But after months of public workshops and closed-door deliberations, her hand-picked Charter Reform Working Group isn’t moving the city forward at all.

Its recommendations largely ignore the four fundamental flaws and instead propose a strong mayor system that risks dragging Oakland back to the corruption and special interest dealings that made Tammany Hall famous.

Why is a strong-mayor system bad for Oakland? Because the city, as the recent Sheng Thao recall made clear, is not immune to the threat of corruption. The long-term damage that an unqualified, incompetent, compromised or immoral — but superpowered — mayor can inflict on the city is too great. The recall bar is too high, and four years is far too long to wait when change is urgently needed. Witness the current president of the United States.

Instead, the Oakland City Council should ask voters to adopt a system based on the Model City Charter, developed by the National Civic League. Now in its ninth edition, published in 2021, this is the true modern approach to city governance.

It lays out a system for cities where a democratically elected board of directors (the city council) oversees a professional executive (the city manager) who can be fired at any time. The citywide elected mayor runs the council meeting, sets agendas and determines committee appointments.

There are 101 cities in our metro region, and there’s a reason why all of them — except Oakland and San Francisco (which is a dual city and county) — use a permutation of the Model City Charter: because it works.

Since its introduction in 1900, the Model City Charter has proven remarkably effective. Its adoption by thousands of U.S. cities has coincided with a sharp decline in urban corruption. By one estimate, municipal corruption levels today are 80% lower than they were in the 1870s.

The beauty of the Model City Charter lies in its accountability. If the city manager is doing a poor or unacceptable job — if potholes go unfilled, graffiti goes unabated or 911 response times lag — the City Council can act swiftly. It can terminate that person and hire a new, more capable administrator within months, not years. The model charter also avoids the risks of concentrating too much power in one elected official who may be beholden to the special interest groups that funded their election.

In this way, the council-manager system best ensures representative democracy: your directly elected councilmembers oversee city operations and when a majority believe change is necessary, they have the authority to make it happen. That is not the case under a strong-mayor system, where councilmembers are frozen out of operational decisions and responsibility.

Notably, the Mayor’s working group is not suggesting that a strong-mayor structure delivers more transparent, responsive, effective or efficient governance. (It doesn’t.) Instead, the Working Group promotes it because it “aligns with public expectations.” In other words: the working group believes we should ignore decades of evidence about what works in cities across America because Oakland voters supposedly want a strong mayor today.

If this proposal goes forward, all future mayors would be strong mayors — not just today’s mayor. We must ask: would the public have supported a strong-mayor system one year ago, in the wake of Thao’s recall? We don’t think so.

Steven Falk, Ben Gould and Nancy Falk are co-founders of the Oakland Charter Reform Project. Steven Falk formerly served as interim city administrator of the city of Oakland. Gould serves on Oakland’s Budget Advisory Commission. Nancy Falk is a retired Kaiser Permanente executive and board member of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland.